I was young and I needed the money

A while ago I was digging through some boxes and found the remainders of my old comic strip. I trot them out whenever anybody gives me half a chance, so some of the people reading this have already seen them. If you do a Google search on “Spectre Collie,” most of the links are to Precambrian web index sites that were linking to my old version of the comic.

But I noticed that they were more yellowed than I remembered, and some of them were water-damaged. I’d scanned in a bunch of them right after I graduated college and started up a website, but all that was lost in one of my computer upgrades. I dug through all my old floppy discs the other night looking for any remnants of the stuff from my old website, but it’s apparently gone for good. (It’s kind of a shame, too — I had 3D models of space billboards and everything.)

So I scanned in some of the remainders of the comic strip and put them back on the internets. And added gratuitous AJAX to the whole thing, just because I could. It’s all right here.

Update: I just noticed that the page only works in Safari, and is non-functional in every other browser. Sweet. So I took out all the complicated hijinx and just made it a normal page. It’s still reading entries dynamically in PHP from an external XML file, so it’s at least a little bit over-engineered.

Related

8 thoughts on “I was young and I needed the money”

BTW, I couldn’t get the comics to show at all using Firefox, and they stopped showing after “Heat” when using Safair until I refreshed the page, and then they all loaded, without clicking on the titles.

Does that make sense? Anyway, could just be an issue with my computer. It’s been tempermental recently.

Please, please, please post “Even God hates them”! That episode placed you amongst the ranks of S. Rushdi, H.S. Thompson, and especially Danish cartoonists. True, that episode did not result in a fatwa, but think about the similarities. One person expressing disagreement with an inflexible, intolerant institution (no alliteration intended) by exercising their freedom of speech was deemed to be such a threat that retributory action resulted. Just what exactly was the threat anyway? I suggest that some have so much of their identity, their sense of self even, so wrapped up in conforming to a set of ideals that any percieved threat to those ideals or institution becomes a threat to their own identity. Because few of your other readers (Ya listening, Matt?) know about that incident, I’ll break off of the fiery rhetoric for now. But please consider the similarities and therefore the timeliness of dredging up the past. Just a geek cartoonist easily dismissed by the conforming masses? I think not! You had power and they feared it. (Now I’m getting the outdated urge to drop to my knees shouting “I’m not worthy! I’m not worthy!”, but discussions of my sense of self can wait.)
-John

Hey, John! I’m all about pleasing my fans, you know, but that strip has been lost for good. I turned in the originals to the paper, and it turns out they threw a lot of them away. When I stopped doing it and asked for the originals back, they only had about 30 left, from almost two years’ worth of a daily strip.

The exact threat, if I remember, was “how would you like it if me and some of my buddies came over there and kicked your ass?” Considering they had my address as well as the phone number, I’m guessing I scared them away.

That wasn’t the only threat I got, though. A bunch of elementary school girls wrote angry letters to the paper about my anti-New Kids on the Block stance, calling it “cruel and inhumane.”

Awwww, awright……. Any chance you’d be willing to at least inform your faithful masses of the event? Besides, I’ve told that story to at least 10 people in the last couple of years, and I can’t remember if the wrathful object was a meteor or what. And actually, exposing elementary school kids to the NKOB is “cruel and inhumane”. Besides, “cruel and Inhumane” is the term used for lab rats, or animal shelter cases, or lemmings or……oh. Nevemind, I see the connection now…

John: it was just a frat guy standing in line going on about how wasted he got at a kegger the other night. Then there’s a bolt of lightning, and the last panel shows a smoking mass and everybody else in line smiling. The caption was “God hates them too.”

Alejandro: Not gonna happen. Webcomics are so late 90’s, man. These days, it’s all about Flash animation! Which isn’t gonna happen either. After I fail the NaNoWriMo this year too, then I’ll start thinking about doing another project and leaving it half-finished.